Although I enjoyed this article and don't mind seeing it on hacker news, I can understand the question tho, and actually have found myself wonder about it.
of course we are human, but it's called "hacker news" and I guess people expect computer related news here. Just like when I visit soccer.com, I'm not expecting news about AI or Anne Frank :)
So it's not about being people too, it's about the subject focused (or at least implied) by this website.
I can also see the fact that HN is now more a community that an actual news site and people like to talk about more and more various subjects.
Hackers/technocrats armed the Wehrmacht, built The Bomb, developed chemical and biological weapons, and have an awful tendency to go "me, I just make the widget. What they use it for is their problem."
Therefore it's important that we talk about these things.
So are all the other people on earth. There are other outlets for general interest news. The appeal of HN to me is that it's limited specifically to tech-related news.
I just don't get these types of complaints (on dying ./ they are doing the same thing over and over). There are hundreds of tech-related stories every day and it's not as if somebody forces you to click on the Anne Frank link so you can complain about it.
You're probably right that this article is off-topic and should be flagged, but this...
> The appeal of HN to me is that it's limited specifically to tech-related news.
...is wrong. The guidelines have said for years that on-topic is:
> Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
For me, the hope that somewhere underneath our interest in growth hacks, new programming languages, and this week's hottest JS framework exists basic human decency.
edit: Allow me to rephrase a bit. Our actions as technologists have real effects upon real people. It is incumbent upon us to consider how the tools we make may harm or help our fellow human beings.
In Canada, newly graduated engineers are given iron rings to remind them of the ethical obligations incumbent in their jobs. We should all be so fortunate as to have a physical token reminding us of this on a daily basis.
